Imagine this: An adult human body, lying on a table. It is not alive — it never did have ‘life’. But it has all organs functioning — except the brain. It is not sentient; it can never feel pain or pleasure — it is “experientially blank”. A fully lab-grown zombie, produced for scientific experiments, including drug testing.

Welcome to the emerging world of ‘bodyoids’.

Come to think of it, if you can grow organs-on-a-chip, why not an entire human body?

Scientists are researching developing bodyoids — they are not there yet, but well on the way.

They are using pluripotent stem cells, which are the earliest cells that form and give rise to every other type of cell in the body. From pluripotent stem cells to actual embryos, it is but a hop, as is embryo to fetus. After all, they also have artificial uterus technology to help.

So, in the near future, a biotech company can mass-produce human bodies that medical students can dissect and study, pharma companies can inject with drugs and assess their effect, avoiding putting mice and primates through the misery of drug tests.

Some may find the idea of bodyoids exciting, others disturbing, raising ethical questions.

Writing in MIT Technology Review, Carsten T Charlesworth, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, is all for it. He says it is possible to even build animal bodyoids for, say, work in agricultural fields, replacing sentient animals. Charlesworth does advocate caution, but stresses that “the opportunity is too important to ignore”.